7/16/2009 @ 7:40PM

Dahn Yoga: Body, Brain and Wallet

In September 2006 Amy Shipley was a bubbly junior at the University of Illinois at Chicago, majoring in education. A homecoming court princess in high school, Shipley worked evenings as a cocktail waitress to pay for college. Two years later Shipley says she was a “glassy-eyed train wreck” who had difficulty reading and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. She graduated with $32,000 in loans–none of which went for tuition. What happened? She signed up for yoga at an outfit called Dahn Yoga & Health Centers, a Mesa, Ariz. national chain of 139 yoga centers.

Fifteen months and dozens of workshops later she says she was not only out a big chunk of change but, as she puts it, “fully cooked”–indoctrinated into a cult.

Shipley, now 25, is one of 27 former Dahn practitioners who filed suit in Arizona in May claiming the group subjected them to psychological manipulation and fraudulently induced them to spend thousands of dollars on Dahn yoga classes and retreats in Sedona, Ariz. and other places. The punishing techniques, they say, included forced isolation from friends and families, exercises like bowing 3,000 times all night long without breaks, disciplining members by sticking their heads in the toilet and making them lick other members’ feet, and having them hold certain poses, like the push-up position, for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. On top of those charges, the suit alleges that Ilchi Lee, the 57-year-old Korean founder of Dahn and its spiritual leader, sexually preyed on young female disciples.

Dahn Yoga calls the suit frivolous and has filed a motion to dismiss on various grounds, including prior settlements with three of the plaintiffs. Two of those settlements included unusual provisions forbidding the former members from complaining about Dahn Yoga to any government agencies. Ilchi Lee is also seeking to dismiss counts against him personally, contending he wasn’t directly involved.

Calling Dahn Yoga a cult, says company rep Joseph Alexander, “is laughable” and “culturally racist. It’s no different from acupuncture when it came to this country. It just takes a lot more educating for people to accept it.”

The explosive charges threaten what appears to be a highly lucrative enterprise. The charismatic Ilchi Lee (born Seung Heun Lee) founded the parent company, Dahn World, in 1985 in Seoul. Dahn (“energy” in Korean) is derived from an ancient Korean form of training that aims to maximize the health of body, mind and spirit through a combination of yoga, tai chi and martial arts.

Dahn, a.k.a. Dahn Hak, has 1,221 centers in nine countries. The company and its affiliates employ 5,053 people and claim 1.9 million people have practiced Dahn yoga. It also has 22 “Body and Brain” franchises in the U.S. at which it teaches a technique it calls brain wave vibration, a kind of “yoga for the brain” that uses rhythmic movements to “balance” your mind and reduce stress. Information on the firm’s revenues is sketchy. A South Korean weekly magazine reported that Dahn World had global revenue of 170 billion won in 2003 (that’s $133 million today). Dahn World boasted in that publication that margins far exceeded those of Korean car manufacturers. Some internal documents seen by forbes suggest Dahn will take in an estimated $34 million this year in the U.S.

The lawsuit’s allegations echo what many cult experts like Steven Hassan, Rick A. Ross and Cathleen Mann have been saying for years about Dahn. Hassan, a Somerville, Mass. mental health counselor who has helped scores of former Dahn members, says the group uses deceptive recruitment and mind-control techniques to create a dissociative disorder among followers, splitting them off from their families and value systems. Dahn’s spokesperson says these unfounded “rumors and innuendoes” are simply efforts to hurt a large and visible brand in yoga training.

The current suit isn’t the first against the group. In 2002 former Dahn devotee and manager Sun Hee Park filed suit in California state court, alleging that Dahn brainwashed her and its other members for profit and that she was coerced into having sexual intercourse with Lee. The defendants settled the case for an undisclosed sum.

Three years later the siblings of Julia Margaret Siverls, a ccny professor, filed a wrongful death action in New York state court, charging that their 41-year-old sister “was drugged and killed by the Dahn Hak cult” during a training retreat in Sedona. The siblings claimed Siverls died of heat exhaustion during an endurance hike up a mountain in 90-degree weather with virtually no food or water and wearing a backpack filled with 40 pounds of rocks. The Dahn defendants denied any wrongdoing. After three years the two remaining Dahn-affiliated defendants settled the action.

The litigation hasn’t seemed to dent Ilchi Lee’s reputation as a spiritual leader. Twelve U.S. cities have proclaimed Ilchi Lee days in recognition, Dahn says, of their founder’s contributions to brain education. Lee lectures around the world at brain education conferences sponsored by his foundations, the International Brain Education Association and the Korea Institute of Brain Science.

Lee has written that he rediscovered the long lost art of Dahn training while in his early 30s on a 21-day fast on Korea’s Moak Mountain in 1980. He began teaching the methods in a public park and opened the first Dahn Center in downtown Seoul in 1985. Lee later opened centers across Korea, and corporations like GoldStar (now LG Electronics), SK Group and Daewoo Group invited Lee to teach Dahn to their employees. Corporate clients now include such companies as
Posco
, a Korean steel company, and Rockwell Samsung Automation, a Korean division of the Wisconsin company.

Lee opened his first U.S. center in Philadelphia in 1991 and left subordinates to run it while he returned to Korea, where he soon faced criminal charges. In 1993 Lee was convicted of distributing medicine without a license and violating real estate, food sanitation and education laws. Sentenced to two and a half years and a fine of 105 million won ($82,000 today), Lee spent 70 days in jail. Dahn spokesman Alexander says the offenses would not be illegal in the U.S. and are no longer criminal in Korea.

The U.S. operations struggled at first. An incident in 1993 didn’t help matters: a Korean-American Dahn member fatally strangled his wife during a psychotic episode and then fled to a Dahn center, where he was arrested. Membership among Korean-Americans dropped sharply, prompting Lee to court other Americans. He soon decided to set up operations in the New Agey town of Sedona. In 2001 Dahn added “yoga” to the name to pick up on the craze.

Dahn practitioners pay fees ranging from $89 to $180 per month. But the plaintiffs allege that the organization pressures members to take intensive training courses, enabling them to become paid “Dahn Masters” who work for one of the Dahn centers or affiliated companies. The workshops, anywhere from a day to three weeks, cost up to $10,000 each. Plaintiffs say Dahn induces students to take out loans and max out their credit cards to pay for the classes. Marjory Gargosh, 61, took out a home equity loan to pay for training; she says she ultimately sold her house to pay for $69,000 in Dahn classes.

On average the non-Korean plaintiffs owe $30,000 as a result of their Dahn experience. Dahn’s spokesperson says the organization doesn’t encourage members to take loans and that the plaintiffs are hurting because “they didn’t manage their money well.”

Shipley says she spent some $45,000 on Dahn-related programs (including the $32,000 in loans still unpaid). Obtaining these funds, Shipley says, was part of her “money training,” a means of showing her commitment to Dahn. Shipley says her Dahn mentor spent countless hours helping her research potential sources of funding and accompanying her to banks. Among the loans she received was a $5,500
Sallie Mae
loan paid directly to a Dahn affiliate, the Sun Institute, a New Jersey massage school, for “DahnMuDo” training, a 12-day course in noncombative martial arts she attended in Sedona.

The plaintiffs say that as they progressed to the more intensive training, they were coerced into recruiting new members. Members who become Dahn Masters are required to help satisfy revenue and recruitment quotas set for their center, known as “vision.” To make “vision,” plaintiffs say they were forced to work up to 120 hours a week at Dahn Yoga centers. Failure to hit their quotas, the suit alleges, subjected them to anything from expulsion to physical punishment.

Dahn centers sell a variety of products it deems healing-related. Nina Miller, a plaintiff in the Arizona suit, is seeking reimbursement for the $1,800 she spent on a gold painted “Okum turtle”–an item purportedly made from “living metallic materials” that “optimizes harmony within the body.” For $450 Dahn sells a kit that includes a Brain Respiration Quotient, a transmitter that uses light and sound to supposedly stimulate the brain, and Power Brains, a brain-shaped handheld vibrator that is said to increase awareness during meditation.

Testimonials on the company’s Web site claim brain wave vibration has lowered high blood pressure, corrected lazy eyes and healed the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. But the company cannot point to any independent peer-reviewed studies vouching for its effectiveness. Brian Cummings, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, says calling it pseudoscience would be generous. “Exercising, stretching and meditating may be beneficial to health. But there is no science behind the claim that vibrations in the body alter brain activity in a meaningful way,” says Cummings.

Dahn claims that founder Ilchi Lee is no longer directly involved in the company but instead runs a consulting firm, BR Consulting, which owns the intellectual property used by Dahn Yoga. (Lee is seeking to dismiss the suit against him on this basis as well.) But according to the plaintiffs, Ilchi Lee controls them all. They claim Dahn’s profits are transferred to Lee and used to fund a lifestyle that includes a horse ranch in Arizona, high stakes gambling, a yacht and a private jet. forbes confirmed that BR Consulting owns the jet, the horse ranch and some residential properties.

Dahn also has dozens of Body & Brain clubs on college campuses scattered across the country, including at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Oregon, Harvard and Columbia. It’s moving into the nation’s school systems as well. The group’s latest effort is the Brain Education School Project, which has kids using physical and cognitive exercises to supposedly improve their attention and confidence. Dahn’s spokesperson says it’s being used in 300 schools in such cities as Buffalo Grove, Ill. and Arlington, Mass.

Last January Ilchi Lee visited P.S. 65 in the South Bronx, which Dahn claims has incorporated brain education exercises into the curriculum. Students played with Lee’s trademark wooden staff while teachers joined him in a brain vibration session. A spokesperson for the New York City Board of Education confirmed that brain education has been implemented in some fashion in 44 New York City public schools in the past year, all at the initiative of individual schools. The board was unaware of the allegations in the Arizona suit.